1453 Quotes

“and he prepared his elite professional household regiments: the infantry – the famous Janissaries – the cavalry regiments, and all the other attendant corps of gunners, armorers, bodyguards, and military police. These crack troops, paid regularly every three months and armed at the sultan’s expense, were all Christians largely from the Balkans, taken as children and converted to Islam. They owed their total loyalty to the sultan. Although few in number – probably no more than 5,000 infantry – they comprised the durable core of the Ottoman army.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“Perhaps no defensive structure summarized the truth of siege warfare in the ancient and medieval world as clearly as the walls of Constantinople. The city lived under siege for almost all its life; its defenses reflected the deepest character and history of the place, its mixture of confidence and fatalism, divine inspiration and practical skill, longevity and conservatism.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“Instantly Mehmet had clarified the practice of Ottoman succession, which he was later to codify as a law of fratricide: “whichever of my sons inherits the sultan’s throne, it behooves him to kill his brother in the interest of the world order.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“The Ottoman makeup was a unique assemblage of different elements and peoples: Turkish tribalism, Sunni Islam, Persian court practices, Byzantine administration, taxation, and ceremonial, and a high-flown court language that combined Turkish structure with Arabic and Persian vocabulary. It had an identity all of its own.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“Of all Ottoman innovations none was perhaps more significant than the creation of a regular army.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“The detailed gorgeousness of Orthodoxy was the reversed image of the sparse purity of Islam. One offered the abstract simplicity of the desert horizon, a portable worship that could be performed anywhere as long as you could see the sun, a direct contact with God, the other images, colors, and music, ravishing metaphors of the divine mystery designed to lead the soul to heaven. Both were equally intent on converting the world to their vision of God.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“The detailed gorgeousness of Orthodoxy was the reversed image of the sparse purity of Islam.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“It was the beauty of the liturgy in St. Sophia that converted Russia to Orthodoxy after a fact-finding mission from Kiev in the tenth century experienced the service and reported back: “we knew not whether we were in Heaven or earth. For on earth there is no such splendour and beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We only know that there God dwells among men.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“The failure of Islam to take the city in 717 had far-reaching consequences. The collapse of Constantinople would have opened the way for a Muslim expansion into Europe that might have reshaped the whole future of the West; it remains one of the great “What ifs” of history. It blunted the first powerful onslaught of Islamic jihad that reached its high watermark fifteen years later at the other end of the Mediterranean when a Muslim force was defeated on the banks of the Loire, a mere 150 miles south of Paris.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“For fifty-three days their tiny force had confounded the might of the Ottoman army; they had faced down the heaviest bombardment in the Middle Ages from the largest cannon ever built – an estimated 5,000 shots and 55,000 pounds of gunpowder; they had resisted three full-scale assaults and dozens of skirmishes, killed unknown thousands of Ottoman soldiers, destroyed underground mines and siege towers, fought sea battles, conducted sorties and peace negotiations, and worked ceaselessly to erode the enemy’s morale – and they had come closer to success than they probably knew.”
― Roger Crowley, Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453

“Behind the Palace walls Mehmed indulged in an atypical pursuits of a tyrant: gardening, handicrafts and and a commissioning of the obscene frescos.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“special”
― Roger Crowley, Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453

“It remained inconceivable within Islamic theology that the whole of humankind would not, in time, either accept Islam or submit to Muslim rule.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“Henceforth the Orthodox shunned St. Sophia as “nothing better than a Jewish synagogue or a heathen temple”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“Mehmet had three clear objectives for his new fleet: to blockade the city, to attempt to force a way into the Horn, and to oppose any relieving fleet that might sail up the Marmara.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“Between them they estimated a fleet of something between 12 and 18 full war galleys composed of a mixture of triremes and biremes, then 70 to 80 smaller fustae, about 25 parandaria – heavy transport barges – and a number of light brigantines and other small message boats, a force of about 140 boats in all. It was an awesome sight to glimpse over the curve of the western horizon.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“In early April, while the big guns were busy pounding the land walls, Mehmet began to deploy the fleet, his other new weapon, for the first time.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“On April 12 lighted tapers were put to the touchholes of the sultan’s guns along a four-mile sector, and the world’s first concerted artillery bombardment exploded into life.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“The lure of the Red Apple was dangled before the expectant gaze of the faithful. It was on these dual promises, so attractive to the tribal raider, of taking plunder while fulfilling the will of God, that Mehmet prepared his strike.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“In January 1453 Mehmet ordered a test firing of the great gun outside his new royal palace at Edirne. The mighty bombard was hauled into position near the gate and the city was warned that the following day “the explosion and roar would be like thunder, lest anyone should be struck dumb by the unexpected shock or pregnant women might miscarry.” In the morning the cannon was primed with powder. A team of workmen lugged a giant stone ball into the mouth of the barrel and rolled it back down to sit snugly in front of the gunpowder chamber. A lighted taper was put to the touch hole. With a shattering roar and a cloud of smoke that hazed the sky, the mighty bullet was propelled across the open countryside for a mile before burying itself six feet down in the soft earth.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“The Ottomans were probably already casting guns at Edirne by this time; what Orban brought was the skill to construct the molds and control the critical variables on a far greater scale.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“He feared its potential to furnish a cause for endless war with Christian powers in the future. Captured, it would provide the centerpiece of the empire, “without it, or while it is as at present, nothing we have is safe, and we can hope for nothing additional.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“The Orthodox, in reply, claimed that the addition was theologically untrue; that the Holy Spirit proceeds only from the Father, and to add the name of the Son was heretical. Such issues were the stuff of riots within Constantinople.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“Flee from the papists as you would from a snake and from the flames of a fire. St. Mark Eugenicus, fifteenth-century Greek Orthodox theologian”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“It is far better for a country to remain under the rule of Islam than be governed by Christians who refuse to acknowledge the rights of the Catholic Church. Pope Gregory VII, 1073”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“Mehmet’s response was short and to the point: “what the city contains is its own; beyond the fosse it has no dominion, owns nothing. If I want to build a fortress at the sacred mouth, it can’t forbid me.” He reminded the Greeks of the many Christian attempts to bar Ottoman passage over the straits and concluded in typically forthright style: “Go away and tell your emperor this: ‘the sultan who now rules is not like his predecessors. What they couldn’t achieve, he can do easily and at once; the things they did not wish to do, he certainly does. The next man to come here on a mission like this will be flayed alive.’” It could hardly be clearer.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“The man whom the Renaissance later presented as a monster of cruelty and perversion was a mass of contradictions. He was astute, brave, and highly impulsive – capable of deep deception, tyrannical cruelty, and acts of sudden kindness. He was moody and unpredictable, a bisexual who shunned close relationships, never forgave an insult, but who came to be loved for his pious foundations. The key traits of his mature character were already in place: the later tyrant who was also a scholar; the obsessive military strategist who loved Persian poetry and gardening; the expert at logistics and practical planning who was so superstitious that he relied on the court astrologer to confirm military decisions; the Islamic warrior who could be generous to his non-Muslim subjects and enjoyed the company of foreigners and unorthodox religious thinkers.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“After 350 years the defeat at Varna extinguished the appetite in the West for crusading; never again would Christendom unite to try to drive the Muslims out of Europe.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“Despite the efforts of some Turkish historians to claim her as an ethnic Turk and a Muslim, the strong probability is that she was a Western slave, taken in a frontier raid or captured by pirates, possibly Serbian or Macedonian and most likely born a Christian – a possibility that casts a strange light on the paradoxes in Mehmet’s nature.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

“When the Spaniard Pero Tafur visited, he found even the emperor’s palace “in such a state that both it and the city show well the evils which the people have suffered and still endure … the city is sparsely populated … the inhabitants are not well clad, but sad and poor, showing the hardship of their lot,” before adding with true Christian charity, “which is, however, not as bad as they deserve, for they are a vicious people, steeped in sin.”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West